The Cappon Magro, Alain Ducasse’s Signature Dish

Popularized in France by Ducasse, the Cappon Magro is a 16th century dish that is rich in flavor. Served cold, usually as the first course, the Cappon Magro consists of a fish galantine with seasoned vegetables paired with a sauce and served in a terrine. For this dish that requires preparation the night before, Alain Ducasse reinterpreted the ancestral dressing and gave it a fresh and elegant new breath of life. Leaving sophistication behind, Ducasse goes back to a raw, simple style of cuisine. The salad is subtly deposed on a cracker, topped with a mixture of vegetables and seafood. This signature dish is in the same league as the cookpot, one of Alain Ducasse’s other essential dishes, a simple but perfect combination of heritage, savoir-faire, and authentic and fresh products. Through his authentic cuisine as well as his no frills interpretations, Ducasse defends what he likes to call the simplicity of original flavors that strive to be original. The underlying idea, making something good out of something simple, is for him a new type of luxury, since: “Astonishment, sometimes, resides in the simplest things. After all, isn’t simplicity the new luxury?”

Of the 23 restaurants and 3 inns stamped with the Ducasse name, each and every one is different, each shining with the savoir-faire of this native of the Pyrénées-Atlantique region. An exceptional menu, highly technical execution in the kitchen, and one key idea: perfection of and respect for the finished product. For each restaurant or inn, the menu’s offerings are in perfect synergy with the specific location, with a few dishes consistently available in each. Of all these exceptional dishes in the chef’s repertoire, the Cappon Magro is one of the select few dubbed a “signature” and remains a veritable icon of Duccasian cuisine.

Alain Ducasse, at the height of his empire, is today a businessman but also one of the most renowned chefs around the globe for his modern and original cuisine. At the center of his concoctions, his specialties, or as he calls them, his signature dishes, like the Cappon Magro, are cornerstone ingredients revisited by the starred chef like a creative director at a fashion house. As Ducasse himself says, “The consumer today is disloyal, they shop around, so you have to seduce them with something different.”